Application security is no longer a choice. Between increasing attacks and regulatory pressures, organizations must establish an effective capability for securing their applications. Given the staggering number of applications and lines of code already in production, many organizations are struggling to get a handle on the enormous volume of vulnerabilities. OWASP recommends that organizations establish an application security program to gain insight and improve security across their application portfolio. Achieving application security requires many different parts of an organization to work together efficiently, including security and audit, software development, and business and executive management. It requires security to be visible, so that all the different players can see and understand the organization’s application security posture. It also requires focus on the activities and outcomes that actually help improve enterprise security by reducing risk in the most cost effective manner. Some of the key activities in effective application security programs include:

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|{{Top 10:RoundedBoxBegin|year=2013}}<br/>Get Started

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Application functions related to authentication and session management are often not implemented correctly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, session tokens, or exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities.

XSS flaws occur whenever an application takes untrusted data and sends it to a web browser without proper validation or escaping. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites.

A direct object reference occurs when a developer exposes a reference to an internal implementation object, such as a file, directory, or database key. Without an access control check or other protection, attackers can manipulate these references to access unauthorized data.

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* Establish a set of focused policies and standards that provide an application security baseline for all development teams to adhere to.

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* Define a common set of reusable security controls that complement these policies and standards and provide design and development guidance on their use.

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* Establish an application security training curriculum that is required and targeted to different development roles and topics.

Good security requires having a secure configuration defined and deployed for the application, frameworks, application server, web server, database server, and platform. All these settings should be defined, implemented, and maintained as many are not shipped with secure defaults. This includes keeping all software up to date.

* Provide subject matter experts and support services for development and project teams to be successful.

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|{{Top 10:RoundedBoxBegin|year=2013}}<br/>A6–Sensitive Data Exposure

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|{{Top 10:RoundedBoxBegin|year=2013}}Provide Management Visibility

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Many web applications do not properly protect sensitive data, such as credit cards, tax ids, and authentication credentials. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct identity theft, credit card fraud, or other crimes. Sensitive data deserves extra protection such as encryption at rest or in transit, as well as special precautions when exchanged with the browser.

Virtually all web applications verify function level access rights before making that functionality visible in the UI. However, applications need to perform the same access control checks on the server when each function is accessed. If requests are not verified, attackers will be able to forge requests in order to access unauthorized functionality.

A CSRF attack forces a logged-on victim’s browser to send a forged HTTP request, including the victim’s session cookie and any other automatically included authentication information, to a vulnerable web application. This allows the attacker to force the victim’s browser to generate requests the vulnerable application thinks are legitimate requests from the victim.

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|{{Top 10:RoundedBoxBegin|year=2013}}A9-Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities

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Vulnerable components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules almost always run with full privilege. So, if exploited, they can cause serious data loss or server takeover. Applications using these vulnerable components may undermine their defenses and enable a range of possible attacks and impacts.

Web applications frequently redirect and forward users to other pages and websites, and use untrusted data to determine the destination pages. Without proper validation, attackers can redirect victims to phishing or malware sites, or use forwards to access unauthorized pages.

Application security is no longer a choice. Between increasing attacks and regulatory pressures, organizations must establish an effective capability for securing their applications. Given the staggering number of applications and lines of code already in production, many organizations are struggling to get a handle on the enormous volume of vulnerabilities. OWASP recommends that organizations establish an application security program to gain insight and improve security across their application portfolio. Achieving application security requires many different parts of an organization to work together efficiently, including security and audit, software development, and business and executive management. It requires security to be visible, so that all the different players can see and understand the organization’s application security posture. It also requires focus on the activities and outcomes that actually help improve enterprise security by reducing risk in the most cost effective manner. Some of the key activities in effective application security programs include: